Clinical Trials in Adult Communication and Swallowing Disorders: Building the Evidence Base for Patient-Centered Care

Purpose: Clinical trials provide essential evidence for determining whether interventions are safe, effective, clinically meaningful, and suitable for translation into practice. This introduction reviews the purpose, core features, and ethical requirements of clinical trials, with attention to emerging adaptive trial designs and the importance of transparency through trial registration, protocol publication, and dissemination. It also highlights contributions from the 2025 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Research Symposium, “Clinical Trials Conducted With Adult Populations,” with a focus on adult-onset communication and swallowing disorders, including aphasia, primary progressive aphasia, dysphagia, and communication disability. Conclusions: The studies and reviews featured in the symposium illustrate how clinical trial research can strengthen the evidence base for adult communication and swallowing interventions by refining treatment dose, comparing active intervention approaches, supporting staged behavioral intervention development, identifying physiologic treatment targets, and evaluating implementation strategies in real-world health systems. Together, these contributions underscore the importance of clinical trial literacy among speech-language pathologists and related clinicians so that research findings can be critically interpreted and effectively translated into patient-centered practice.